Young Voters Should Take Another Look at Obama

Congratulations. You have truly changed America. Those of you under 30 voted 66 percent to 32 percent for Barack Obama, an unprecedented margin. Your elders 30 and over voted for him, too, but only by a 50 percent to 49 percent margin. You converted a 2000-like margin to a solid majority and added significant numbers to the Democratic majorities in Congress.

You voted, as your candidate and our president said, for Hope and Change. But I ask you to consider whether the policies that the president has proposed and in some cases pushed through really amount to that.

I ask you to examine them through the prism of a book published in 1999, when most of you were too young to vote: "The Future and Its Enemies," by Virginia Postrel (an Obama voter, too, by the way). Postrel assesses policies based not on whether they are liberal or conservative but on whether they are dynamist -- promoting or leaving room for change -- or stasist -- tending to freeze institutions and people in place.

By my reckoning, the Obama policies are more stasist than dynamist. The unions' card-check bill, which he backs, would effectively abolish the secret ballot in union elections and impose mandatory federal setting of wages and work rules after 120 days of union-management negotiations.

Centralized mediators would determine your pay and work rules, modeled perhaps after those between the United Auto Workers and what we used to call the Big Three automakers. They have 5,000 pages of work rules. Don't change that light bulb -- you have to wait for the right union guy to do it. Is this the way to enable you to exercise creativity and initiative in your work?

Then there is the cap-and-trade bill to address what we are told is man-caused global warming. Noble intentions here. But it means paying more for electricity in the meantime for a very distant goal. A similar law in California is threatening blackouts. Renewables sound great, but the wind doesn't always blow and the sun doesn't always shine. How is holding down economic growth going to help you to shape your future?

And there is health care. The intention here -- Obama said it back in 2003 and hasn't denied it since -- is to send us down a road that leads to government-provided health insurance. His latest trial balloon is a centralized medical procedures board that would decide what treatments the government would pay for and wouldn't.

Michael Barone, senior political analyst for The Washington Examiner (www.washingtonexaminer.com), is a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a Fox News Channel contributor and a co-author of The Almanac of American Politics. To find out more about Michael Barone, and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at www.creators.com.
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